Lovina: Impressions of a Town Trying to Catch Up
The immediate impression the visitor to Lovina receives upon arrival at Banjar Hot Springs is its otherworldliness.
Such is the effect of its delicate combination of heat and the surrounding kaleidoscopic swirl of flowers in bloom that it propels you from a pool in northern Bali into a secret garden a million miles away from the rest of the world. It is, you sense, how living in a bubble would feel.
2026 context
This story comes from a visit to Lovina in 2008. It takes place in the low season and comes from a time when Bali was a lot more of a backpacker place rather than an island infected by the content-driven, business entrepreneur, closer, dropshipper, DudeBro, faux-spiritual, let’s-all-build-villas grindset so evident today.
Back then, things were a lot different. You’d visit a place for the sake of spending time there, and there wasn’t this apparent divide between those who want to see Bali and those who want to profit from it, or use it as a romanticised background to further their personal brand.
Looking back from our current vantage point in 2026, it’s interesting to think that the melancholy expressed by the villagers could well have foreshadowed this change in mentality, as though the world were about to change too quickly and violently for a lot of people to handle.
Hopefully, though, Lovina never suffers the same noisy fate as C____u, U__d and U_____u. Our gut feeling is that one day, Lovina will become a high-end luxury place, a bit like those bits of Sumba with the horses and the pottery. The place you’d go to escape the noise of Seseh or Kedungu or Nyanyi or Pererenan or whichever hotspot’s being gobbled up by developers. Whatever happens, hopefully the economic effects will trickle down so that the entire community can benefit.
In a state of transcendental bliss, I dipped my head beneath the water and thought about nearby Lovina.
The Australian property developer I met on the bus from Ubud spoke of this small collection of villages as the next big thing. ‘You mark my words,’ he told me over a plate of nasi goreng, topped with sambal so spicy as to induce foodsweats. ‘This place is on the verge of something special.’
Yearning appeal
On the surface, it looked like he was right. I saw a lot in Lovina that had appealed to the discerning traveller: the long, open black sand beaches; the surrounding hills aching to be walked upon; the glistening ocean ripe for diving and home to pods of dolphins.
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The myriad bars, restaurants, warung and decent travel links all hinted at a town geared towards abundant tourism.
And yet, something was lacking. A dusk walk along Kalibukbuk’s beach crystallised Lovina’s apparent malaise. After being asked for the 5th time in as many minutes if I had any laundry, I asked a friendly masseuse why she was so desperate for money.
‘No one comes here. I have no money, my sons have no money,’ she told me.
‘I just figured it was the quiet season.’
‘It used to have more people!’ she exclaimed, ‘But after what happened – the bombs and the tsunami – people stay away. Maybe next month they will come.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes, people will come, but we still need to eat. Anyway … massage … laundry … you come and find me, okay? I do it cheap for you. Dadah.’ With that, she strode off into the early evening.
Melancholy
Further investigation showed a town struggling to make ends meet. The fishermen slept on the beach to have more time on the ocean; the vendors, outnumbering the tourists, congregated in the town square to sell their wares.
I watched again and again as one of the town’s chefs, offering genuine home cookery classes, faced rejection; in the face of repeated refusal, his smile remained, but the rest of his body sagged.
Gamely grinning, he continued down the beach looking for potential customers. ‘Maybe next month.’
Back in the springs, as my head resurfaced from beneath the spring’s surface, I basked in the beatific glow of the late-afternoon sun shining through gaps in the jungle.
It was hard to reconcile this sublime feeling with the melancholy caused by distant terrorism and natural disasters, which I found in the adjacent villages.
When Japanese colonists first built the pools at Banjar, they were mindful of the healing properties of the Brimstone in the water; in the case of Lovina, I hope the effects can be felt a few miles down the road.
(Editor’s note: It’s not all doom and gloom in Lovina. This story was written during a particularly quiet low season in 2008, and by all accounts, it’s a lot busier around there these days.
It does pose a couple of fundamental questions, though. Having been to a number of places where tourism is so barren as to not even be an issue – Sumba and Madura, for example – why is it some places feel the sting more than others? What constitutes ‘busy’? Do many places actually need tourism? Is tourism a corrupting influence?)
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